An introduction to musical signal processing

Numbers and notes: An introduction to musical signal processing is out now from Perfectly Scientific Inc. Press, located in Portland, OR. Purchase it here. The book has a wide range of topics, extending from the physics of wave motion, tuning and temperament, the acoustics of musical instruments, musical synesthesia and perfect pitch, and digital analysis of music. Numbers and notes will be of particular use to those seeking deep understanding of the discrete and fast Fourier transform, and wishing to use them for audio purposes. Also included are several code examples of the FFT in MATLAB, Mathematica, and C.

Although the book is full of mathematics and science, readers are not required to have extensive mathematical backgrounds. In fact, nothing beyond a high school level of precalculus is required, and every mathematical technique used is introduced in the first chapter for those needing a refresher course. Numbers and notes is perfect for the reader new to the fields of music information retrieval or audio signal processing, or anyone requiring a solid but not tedious explanation of the Fourier transform.

Regina Collecchia graduated from Reed College in 2009 with a BA in Mathematics, and currently resides in San Francisco, California where she works for Sennheiser Innovation and Technology. This book is a spawn of her senior thesis, The Entropy of Musical Classification, which used music information retrieval (MIR) techniques like bandpass filtering and pitch recognition to collect harmonic information from music. With that information, chord progressions were built (i.e. Markov chains), and the conditional entropy was then calculated to identify a possible connection between entropy and the predictability of any kind of classifier, such as region, time period, or artist. She is also a research assistant for the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.